First, I will conclude what I am plannign to do: being a professional software developer for a decade or so, i am building a drone by transferring my knowledge of software projects to this. Hence, the first part was finding use cases and such, and finding preconditions that i want to meet.
Some preconditions are:
- tier structure - arduino == platform driver, android == command gateway, webgui == user interface
- as few soldering and custom parts as possible
- exclusively open source, and free software as far as possible (some might have forgotten - there is a difference)
- web-based (i really dont want to mess around with r/c electronics and reach and such)
- swarm-alike - each drone should be aware of all others, be able to communicate with each other and to help and replace each other (for example seamless drone replacement in POI mode)
Comments
to be honest, I think that my plans are neither realizable in germany ... if I read right here somewhere, you need a line of sight in the us to fly your drones. Well, I plan that my drones organize themselves in a later stage (i got some knowledge of ai). AND (much later) I plan drones that cross continents (having solar cells on board) - but thats really too much scifi for now.
Hi Maarten,
In fact, creating a copter at that stage would be overdose and using arducopter much limiting. As a cheap proof of concept of my modularity concept, I am modding a simple R/C car (learning Curve JLX Overdrive).
Hi Rafael:
being an experienced jee developer, this is my bridge head into drones ;) I can guess this sounds strange for non jee people.
That's a good idea, having a server on the android I didn't know you could do that! Definitely makes it easier to interface! Maybe I'll replace my phone with an android one if you get this to work...
Welcome! You've made a good choice- The field of micro drones / UAVs is in it's early infancy. If I may ask, though, what do you mean by "this thing is not realizable in the US"?
Geof
quite simple - android will work as a bridge between worlds. I am not sure wether I start an appserver on the android or on a dedicated root server somewhere in the internet's vincinity, but since I am a jee server programmer, this one is the easy part -just have to dye out wether I use grails or a jboss ;). And since both android and jboss / grails support java as business layer,... business as usual.
What you're in - did I miss something or why does your profile lack projects? Nice hat btw - damn stylish.
welcome to DIYdrones!
Android-arduino communication through bluetooth is a good idea. However you will have trouble interfacing only through a web-based interface since the serial port is not accessible through javascript. If you have another idea, please share it!
take care